The longest golf courses in France: 469 cards, measured

A golf course announces itself by its par. It is walked in metres, and the two numbers have almost nothing to do with each other.

Here is the length ranking of all 469 French 18-hole courses, measured off the furthest back tee on each card, from the official distances clubs publish. Same scope as our anatomy of a French golf course: compact layouts and nine-hole courses played twice are excluded.

The twenty longest

#	Length	Par	Course	Tee
1	6,796 m	72	Golf Saint Apollinaire, Michelbach-le-Haut	Octagon
2	6,748 m	73	Vaucouleurs, La Rivière	White
3	6,652 m	72	Golf National, Albatros	Black M
4	6,648 m	72	Golf des Aisses	Black
5	6,593 m	72	Les Bordes, New Course	Black
6	6,575 m	72	Lyon Golf Club	Black
7	6,509 m	72	Château de Raray	Black
8	6,503 m	72	La Cabre d'Or	Black
9	6,499 m	72	Golf International de Roissy	Black
10	6,477 m	72	Vidauban	Black Men
11	6,464 m	74	Mérignies, Marque-Rupilly	Black
12	6,463 m	72	Golf de Massane	Black
13	6,458 m	72	Golf Preisch	Blanche
14	6,441 m	72	Stade Français Courson, Vert-Noir	Black
15	6,426 m	72	Alsace Golf	Black
16	6,426 m	72	Stade Français Courson, Vert-Lilas	Black
17	6,412 m	72	Stade Français Courson, Vert-Orange	Black
18	6,405 m	71	Cabot Bordeaux	Black
19	6,399 m	71	Golf de Chantilly, Vineuil	Black
20	6,396 m	72	Area des Forges, Rouge-Bleu	Black

Saint Apollinaire leads by 48 metres, which is not trivial at this end of the table: 400 metres separate 1st from 20th, so the gap between 1st and 2nd accounts for an eighth of the whole spread on its own.

Three of the twenty belong to one club, Stade Français Courson, whose three nine-hole combinations all clear 6,400 metres. And the Albatros at the Golf National, the only French course to have hosted a Ryder Cup, comes in third.

Par tells you nothing about length

This is the ranking's most useful result, and it fits in a line: France's 262 par 72 courses run from 5,176 to 6,796 metres.

Par	Courses	Shortest	Median	Longest	Spread
70	43	5,156 m	5,552 m	5,905 m	749 m
71	96	4,759 m	5,807 m	6,405 m	1,646 m
72	262	5,176 m	6,037 m	6,796 m	1,620 m

1,620 metres is a mile and a half of difference between two courses advertising the identical number at the gate. The shortest French par 72 is Golf de Nampont Saint-Martin at 5,176 metres; the longest is Saint Apollinaire at 6,796. They ask for the same target score.

The practical consequence is simple: a stated par tells you nothing about the walk ahead. The only number that describes it is the length of the tee you will actually play, and that sits on the scorecard of every course page.

Metres per stroke of par

Dividing length by par gives a density figure — how many metres you must cover for each stroke allowed. The French median is 82.9 metres per point of par.

The country's four densest courses:

• 94.4 m/stroke — Saint Apollinaire, 6,796 m for a par 72
• 92.4 m/stroke — Vaucouleurs La Rivière, 6,748 m for a par 73
• 92.4 m/stroke — Golf National Albatros, 6,652 m for a par 72
• 92.3 m/stroke — Les Aisses, 6,648 m for a par 72

Eleven metres per stroke above the median, multiplied by 72, accounts on its own for the mile and a half in the section above.

The longest holes, category by category

Category	Hole	Length	Course
Par 5	18	662 m	La Cabre d'Or
Par 5	15	605 m	Belle Dune
Par 5	15	603 m	Château de Cély
Par 4	5	472 m	Les Bordes, New Course
Par 4	13	459 m	Val d'Amour
Par 4	18	451 m	Golf de Massane
Par 3	8	232 m	Golf de Giez
Par 3	12	228 m	Grand Saint-Émilion
Par 3	15	228 m	Golf de Prunevelle

The 18th at La Cabre d'Or, at 662 metres, is the longest hole in France in any category — with one exception, Seignosse's 18th at 666 metres, but that one is rated a par 6 and so plays in a class of its own.

The 472-metre par 4 at Les Bordes is worth pausing on: it is longer than the shortest par 5 on plenty of French courses. And Giez's 232-metre par 3 exceeds the length of some par 4s in the same country. The categories overlap heavily, which is another way of saying that par is a scoring convention, not a distance measurement.

What the tee you choose changes

A French course offers six tees at the median, and the gap between the most forward and the furthest back reaches 1,210 metres, again at the median.

Put differently, the spread inside a single course is comparable to the spread between two par 72s at opposite ends of the national ranking. Which tee you play weighs as much on the walk as which course you play — a point the ranking above, built on back tees alone, cannot show by itself.

By region

Region	Courses	Average length
Grand Est	40	6,043 m
Centre-Val de Loire	27	5,993 m
Île-de-France	72	5,989 m
Hauts-de-France	40	5,953 m
Pays de la Loire	22	5,912 m
Nouvelle-Aquitaine	60	5,911 m
Normandie	32	5,852 m
Bourgogne-Franche-Comté	22	5,851 m
Occitanie	33	5,827 m
Bretagne	23	5,760 m
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur	41	5,754 m
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes	47	5,752 m

291 metres separate Grand Est from Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. The two shortest regions are also the most mountainous and the longest are the flattest — the correlation is obvious, but length alone cannot demonstrate it. Elevation will settle that, and it gets an article of its own.

And the shortest

Eight French 18-hole courses drop below 4,900 metres off the back tees while still carrying a par of at least 68:

• 4,326 m — GIGA Golf Club, Corsica, par 69
• 4,604 m — Golf de Biot, par 69
• 4,676 m — Golf Côte des Isles, par 68
• 4,686 m — Golf de Gonville, par 68
• 4,823 m — Golf Lys Chantilly, par 68

These are not compact layouts: they are genuine 18-hole courses with a near-normal par, built on land that did not offer the room. GIGA, in Corsica, plays 2,470 metres shorter than Saint Apollinaire for three strokes less of par.

What length does not tell you

It does not tell you difficulty. A flat, wide 6,400-metre course gives itself up more readily than a narrow, hilly 5,800. Length is a component of difficulty, not its measure — that one is called slope, and it deserves its own ranking.

Nor does it tell you elevation: two 5,900-metre courses can demand very different efforts depending on whether they climb.

Method and exclusions

Source: the FlyAway production database, 17 August 2026. Scope: French courses not deleted, non-archived cards, grids of 18 par values totalling 68 or more, doubled nines excluded — 469 courses. Distances come from non-archived tees, and 55% of French teebox records are historical versions: counting them would have distorted every total. Every card retained is in metres.

Two plausibility bounds remove impossible values before any per-hole ranking: a par 3 beyond 250 metres, a par 4 beyond 500. They rejected only two holes in the whole country, and both belong to the same course, Golf de Wimereux. Reading its card closely, the cause is plain: hole 2 is filed as a par 3 of 383 metres and hole 3 as a par 4 of 174 metres — the two pars are swapped. The same thing happens between holes 16 and 17. The total stays at 72, which is why the error survived: the sum is right, the assignment is not. Wimereux is therefore excluded from the per-hole rankings but kept in the overall table, where only total length counts.

Every course cited has its own page, with the full card hole by hole, in the French course directory.